ALTERNATIVE FIELD Inc

Alternative Field is a reading room, poetry library, lab/press, and resource center for inviting poetry to influence, inspire, nurture, and create dialogue as a tool to bring awareness to and exercise thought around issues that are central to our existence and to our potential.

“What happens after the reading, in between the writing, thinking, and living?”

Alternative Field was operating as a small press and resource to the community since 2016 and became a library and resource center in 2019. We are now housed in a space within the Avenue 50 Studio building complex in Highland Park, the hometown of its founding director, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell.

Alternative Field welcomes dialogue, discourse, co-operative thinking in ways that may instigate internal but constructive criticism, and we do this through curated workshops, discussions, interdisciplinary events, and ethically mindful artistic collaborations and partnerships.

We publish anthologies that invite our communities to use their known and/or unknown poetic sensibilities to share this discourse and to archive it for future generations.

Alternative Field utilizes poetry [in opposition to violent systems of erasure] as a means to bring people across communities together for a common cause of re-associating our environments to those which are culturally familiar and relevant, in order to resist erasure, and to emerge from this era moving forward toward a more just future, guided by worldviews that foster collaboration and mutuality.